All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

Holy crap, I didn’t realize that Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem! was already releasing in just a couple weeks! Glad to see Nintendo opened the official site to catch my attention! Nothing new on the site right now, as it’s just a teaser site. Hopefully it’ll update soon, as [...]

HOARD drops tomorrow on PSN, so it’s time you start thinking about tuning up your treasure-hunting skills! Here are a few tips to help you get started on your path to becoming a great dragon and racking up some impressive scores:

• Preserve your score multiplier. You lose your score multiplier whenever you are wounded to zero health, and also whenever a thief finishes stealing from your hoard. If you want to earn Gold ratings on maps, you have to avoid losing your score multiplier too much. It’s better to fly home and heal before getting wounded all the way to zero. And always keep an eye out for those sneaky burglers.
• Armor up for safety! The denizens of the realm are not friendly. Knights and archers make for challenging foes when they come in groups. While upgrading Speed and Fire Breath are sexy, improving your Armor can be key to good scores. If you find yourself constantly getting injured and sent back to your hoard, you probably need tougher scales! Having a few extra hit points means you can make mistakes and not get punished for it.
• Tribute towns are safe points. When you terrorize a town enough without actually killing it, it will start to fear you and send you offering carts full of gold. But another great benefit is that the town’s archers will no longer attack you. If an opponent is chasing you down when you’re weak, go hide out near your tribute town and let the archers do the dirty work for you!
• Don’t kill everything. As the kingdom becomes more populated with farms and houses, there will be much more valuable merchant wagons rolling around. More commerce means more treasure for the taking. If you kill everything and keep the kingdom in ruins, you’ll starve your own hoard! Don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
• There’s a counter-strategy for that. To win at multiplayer, you’ll need to craft a strategy that takes into account all the factors: your own play style, the particular map, and the choices of your opponent. If your opponent is less skilled at fighting, make a fast dragon with powerful breath, and mercilessly hunt him down. If you’re weaker at the twitch stuff, upgrade armor—you’ll be able to take a beating and still get back to your hoard without getting defeated and having to drop your treasure. Keep an eye on what your opponent is upgrading (you can tell by how his dragon appearance changes during the game) so you know what you’re dealing with.

Ok, I promised five tips but we’re on a roll here so how about a sixth for free:

• Gold bandwidth. Upgrading Carry increases how much gold you can pick up before having to return home to your hoard to unload. But another huge benefit is that it increases how quickly you drop off that gold into your hoard. The speeds can get pretty fast at higher Carry levels. Less time dropping gold means more time out pillaging the kingdom, which in turn means more gold for your hoard! And gold for your hoard is the whole point, innit?

And finally, as a super-special bonus, here’s the Trophy list:

HOARD Trophies

Happy HOARDing—hope to see you online on Tuesday!

Tomorrow, Blood Drive will be hitting shelves and players worldwide will be able to take part in the zombie maiming mayhem that is the Blood Drive tournament. At its core, Blood Drive is a combat driving game. It’s all about driving fast, splattering zombies and wrecking as many enemy drivers as possible. Ultimately though, the question must be asked … How did people go from a worldwide zombie apocalypse to the most ruthless, exciting, and action-packed form of sports entertainment ever?

The Blood Drive Tournament is the natural evolution for the gambling paradise in the desert city of Las Ruletas. From its early beginnings during the civil war as a center for illicit arms trading to both sides, the city has fostered a hands-on, do-it-yourself, self-empowering environment. When the zombie apocalypse broke out, the criminal cartels in the city used their resources to preserve their little empire by cutting deals with top secret government bases in the desert. Working together towards a common goal for once, they managed to not only survive the zombie hordes, but to thrive.

As the gambling trade was dying, another attraction in the city was growing. Led by one of the first “Blood Drivers,” Bastian “B.D.“ Dice, the drivers who patrolled the routes to the sanctuary in the desert built upon his philosophies of violence and showmanship. Before long it wasn’t about just keeping the zombie population to a minimum, it was about doing it in style and in the most violent and messy way possible.

The sport grew and new drivers replaced the ones who couldn’t cut it. Soon TV networks and internet sponsors wanted a piece of the action. The battles were structured and codified and the Blood Drive Tournament was born, with B.D. as the ringleader and announcer.

You’ll take the role of one of the eight finalists in the Blood Drive Tournament. Over the course of the game, you will compete in a number of different event types. As you progress, the goals will change and you’ll have to adapt to keep up. From zombie killing to traditional race events, to the crowd favorite King of the Skull, it will take a combination of skill, guts and sheer firepower to claw you way to the top.

There are six different events in the Blood Drive Tournament, each with a unique goal, and thus a unique strategy to win. For the most part, the events center on killing stuff, pure and simple – zombies, cars, cars and zombies … On top of these there are several more traditional race type events that follow the simple principle of crossing the finish line first = winning. The difference between a Blood Drive race and a regular race is that your opponents don’t have any reservations about ramming you, crushing you, shooting you, or doing any number of other things to ensure they come out on top. Oh, and did we mention the zombies? They haven’t quite figured out that they should stay off the course; in fact, they’re everywhere!!

Learning the event styles, the race courses, the zones and the world of Las Ruletas will all play a part in the driver’s success to climb the ladder of the Blood Drive Tournament. Drivers will be able to choose from unique weapon loadouts between events, as well as collect weapon pickups, health, speed boost and other powerups during gameplay. In addition to this, each vehicle has a unique Rage Power that can be used during the events. Killing the walking dead in as many ways as you can think of fuels the Rage Powers. Missiles, bullets, landmines, the side of your car, the front of your car, walls, trash cans, baggage carts – anything available. Regardless of the event, it’s never a bad idea to splatter a zombie or wreck an opponent. At the end of the day only one Blood Driver can come out on top!

I hope this sheds a little light about Blood Drive to you. Please check it out tomorrow if you like what you see!